Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses [LWN.net]

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Sep 30, 2010 22:24 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses by FlorianMueller
Parent article: Red Hat Responds to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Request for Guidance on Bilski

> I can't see "duplication" being such a big issue, especially since commercial licensing deals can always be worked where they're more efficient than duplicate efforts;

Of course. I'm sure Oracle, IBM and SAP share most of their code. Give me a break.

> and "profiteering" happens with all business models.

Yeah, and Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are not worth $80G combined. Where were you in the last two decades?

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Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Oct 1, 2010 4:02 UTC (Fri) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm sure Oracle, IBM and SAP share most of their code. Give me a break.

Sharing code across companies with a different focus only makes sense for larger pieces. Cross-licensing patents is another thing.

There are plenty of problems when trying to integrate open source code available under one license into code under another. GPLv2 isn't even compatible with GPLv3...

Yeah, and Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are not worth $80G combined. Where were you in the last two decades?

Aggressive questions like the last one don't strengthen any of your arguments. Of course I'm aware of the money that's been made in that sector. That's part of capitalism, and as long as competition rules are enforced properly, wealth creation is a good thing. The biggest achievement of those entrepreneurs is not that they made themselves mega-multi-billionaires but that they made many of their employees (typically through stock options) millionaires over the years.

Red Hat has reached a market cap of $8 billion, so it has also had that effect, but the ratio between the value it created in terms of stock and the employment it created for the economy appears less favorable.

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Oct 1, 2010 6:06 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

The difference in this "wealth creation", is that proprietary software does this by overcharging for their monopolies (i.e. what happened in the last two decades), while open source does it by charging for service and support. There is a lot less chance the second model will run away into profiteering, because competiotors have a much easier way of getting in.

Unfortunately for your theories, Red Hat are, as I said before, very good at what they do. So, they take the lion's share (for now).

I have no idea when was the last time you installed anything Red Hat made, but if you did, you would know that there is plenty of innovation there. So, although you are trying to present a situation in which they supposedly don't have the "core" of their product (whatever that's supposed to mean), I can assure you that their "core" is just fine and being rewritten daily. How do you think one gets from Linux From Scratch to Fedora, if not by innovating.

In the end, the main test is which model produces the same goods cheaper. You seem to think that we have to keep spending $50G instead of $5G, because someone may lose their job.

Meaningful vs. meaningless support from businesses

Posted Nov 14, 2010 19:30 UTC (Sun) by promotion-account (guest, #70778) [Link]

And also remember that RedHat has engineers on most of the relevant FOSS layers. From the kernel, to the plumbing layer (NetworkManager, *kit packages, etc), to GCC, to X, to glibc, to GTK, to the foundational GNOME libraries (libxml2, etc), to the user-facing GNOME applications, to the RPM packagers themselves.

So they are not really 'taking away' anything. Our stack wouldn't be the way it is without RedHat.

And speaking of jobs, there are lots and lots of FOSS developers who are having projects that they love thanks to these developers original contributions. Where are they? They are allover the place in the usual silicon valley companies.